Native Conflict Quotes
Most of the Colonies had laws against Indians possessing guns and any white seeing such was allowed to attack such Indians. Rhode Island had peaceful relations with the Indians and not only allowed Indians to carry firearms for hunting but hired them to do the hunting as they were better at it and did not value their time as highly as the whites. However, travelers coming from out of the colony would see an Indian with a gun, and shoot at him thereby killing or injuring friendly Indians and causing racial problems when there were few. The quotation also illustrates that there was little uniformity amongst the colonies as to how to deal with their various social and political problems.
Prior, the Military, worked hard to enforce the Fort Laramie Treaty which gave the Lakota Sioux Indian Tribe exclusive use of the Black Hills. Bu then gold was accidentally found in the Black Hills and white miners started to illegally enter the Lakota territory. Many of them killed Indians that they ran across. See Quotation 643700. President Grant, under huge political pressure instructed General Sheridan to stop enforcing the provisions of the treaty and keep the whites out of the Black Hills. They idea was to allow the miners to clash with the Lakota who would likely defend their sacred land, and when some whites had been killed, send the army in to “pacify” the Indians and use that as a means of relegation of the Treaty so the the gold areas would bee legally accessible.
Not all whites were allowed to usurp all Indian lands. There were many attempts to limit white settlement to avoid friction with the Indians although the overall tendency was for the whites to take over and dominate the land.
Violating these Iroquois “environmental regulations” were not mere technicalities but were enforced by war if necessary. The Iroquois were very sophisticated diplomatically and had appointed Garangula, a chief of one of the Iroquois tribes, to be their Ambassador Plenipotentiary in negotiations with the French.
Marquis de Seignelay. At the time, a perfectly acceptable justification for war on a people was that they were interfering in the plan to convert the area to one particular religion, in this case, Catholicism.
